[vitalychernobyl]

The cap is high to begin with, but later they will begin to lower it and increase the cost. At this point, based on examples of other cable companies and wireless providers, it is almost a given.

Unless of course you believe that Comcast is a benevolent company that tries to help its customers instead of trying to gouge them at every opportunity (former customer, lots of hard feelings) :/

Fingers crossed for Starlink to put a serious dent into their business.

[BitwiseFool]

It's not that high to begin with, 1.2 Tb of data per month is fairly low in my opinion - especially if you have a family.

[derekp7]

To put this in perspective (Hopefully I got the numbers correct, assuming everyone follows the convention of B=Bytes, and b=bits, and 8 bits per byte) -- I believe it is 1.2 TB, not Tb (bytes, not bits). A quick google search shows that Netflix HD streaming is 5 Mbps (bits), which is 2.25 GB (Bytes) per hour.

1.2 TB per month is 40 GB per day. Which is about 17 hours of Netflix HD per day. Seems like a lot, but not if you have multiple family members each watching something different (so just over 4 hours of Netflix per family member). In our case, we have a little one in the house, and Netflix is going most of the day as background for him (against my better judgement, however...). So to help mitigate the bandwidth usage, I adjusted all the profiles on Netflix to use the lowest quality setting, turn off auto-preview, and turned off auto-play next episode -- which cut my monthly usage by 2/3.

Also, a typical Linux ISO image may be about 5 GB (the one "large" item I typically download whenever a new CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu is released). So that is 8 Linux ISO's per day, so not too bad there.

The only thing I haven't measured yet is when what the kid's Zoom class uses up, and my remote RDP sessions. However with two adults in the house and a little one, my usage hovers around 500 GB -- but for some reason back in July I hit about 1 TB, and last month was 800GB.

Now if you have teens in the house, esp. if they are gamers, then I can easily seeing usage well beyond 1.2 TB.

[BitwiseFool]

Imagine you've purchased a digital-only PS5. So just buying and downloading a new game is probably going to eat up ten to fifteen percent of your monthly cap.

I imagine the Xbox Games Pass is even worse for this, since you're going to download many more games.

[derekp7]

I'm not a gamer, so I'm curious which games use 120 - 160 GB when downloading them? Or is that the usage when playing them for a period of time (i.e., downloading assets on the fly)? And I thought that DVD games were huge (4.5 - 8 GB), but I haven't really kept up with current trends.

Edit -- just did some quick searches, it appears some games require 50 - 100 GB minimum storage -- is that what is downloaded, or do they generate game assets from compressed data after installation?

[dgritsko]

That's what is downloaded. Cyberpunk 2077 (releases next month) is supposedly a svelte 70 GB, while the new Call of Duty is a hefty ~133 GB download on the new consoles (and close to 200 when installed).

[extrapickles]

That is what is downloaded. Most AAA games are at least 32gb due to the large worlds and the level of detail required.

Everything that can be compressed is compressed, though there still is room for improvement on compressing mocap (motion capture) data. Mocap is done to get characters movements more natural and to help with lip syncing, though it can take up more room than plain video. Prerendered video is not very seamless and does allow player interaction with the scene beyond choose your own adventure type options. This is more of an issue if they want to show the player character as most games have extensive customization of the look of the player character.

[ssully]

The games are usually compressed, but you can very easily find yourself downloading over 100 gigs for a single game in a month.

A big trend in games these days what is called "live" or "service" games. These are games that are having new content added on a regular schedule (monthly, or sometimes weekly). This means its not unusual to get updates that range in size from 20-60 gigs for a single game in a month. If you play a lot of games or have kids that play different games, you can very easily be burning 200-400 GBs of data a month just keeping your games up to date.

[odessacubbage]

AAA game sizes have gotten absurd over the last generation. lots of needlessly uncompressed audio as well. ime popular multiplayer games are getting patched constantly . i downloaded warthunder on a whim and just with updates alone the file size has already doubled. i haven't even had time to try the game yet.

[dudul]

Some games (looking at you COD) have patches that are 50GB to download.

[zbrozek]

Flight Simulator 2020 was something around 120 GB. I think Call of Duty is pushing 200 GB and it made the news when they managed to shrink it.

On technical merits it makes more sense to implement a good QoS system to ensure fair and responsive access. Caps are a business tool to bolster margins.

[stone-monkey]

Agreed. I just purchased an Xbox One and subscribed to their Netflix style buffet service for digital games. Game sizes range from 20-100GB. I've had to resort to only downloading 2-3 smaller games because my household already gets pretty close to our terabyte quota every month. These gamerpass services aren't nearly as great if you're limited to downloading a single game a month.

[snarf21]

Especially during a global pandemic when schools and business are forced to being digital. I wouldn't hate this so much if it was 5TB, that is at least targeted at top 1% abusers.

[SteveNuts]

Is "using the throughput I pay for" considered abuse? The annoying thing with this is we're charged for throughput (100Mbps, 25Mbps, etc), but then also limited in how long you can sustain that rate.

With my Comcast Gigabit internet I could hit the MONTHLY cap in under 3 hours of the speed I paid for.

[dudul]

They claim that this data cap would not impact 95% of their customers.

I think the timing of this policy change is especially tone deaf.

[nitrogen]

Divide and conquer usually works pretty well. Find some unsympathetic 5% here, another 5% there...

[Forbo]

Or they can just wait for data usage to increase over time. Many AAA gaming titles can chew upwards of 250GB for install, and things like 4K streaming are becoming more common. They don't even need to adjust the cap down, just wait a few years to cash in as more and more people begin to hit the limit.

[tyleo]

This cap is not high for many. I lived in a 4 person house with a 1 TB cap and for the last 3 months we lived there, we were over the cap routinely.

Editing to add context:

This happened in 2018. The cap started a couple of years before that and 1 TB seemed reasonable but content sizes grew and grew until we had to ration Netflix usage and game downloads. We were literally making the decision, "should I watch YouTube today or do I want to watch Netflix tomorrow." I don't think Comcast needs to lower the limit. Growing content sizes will be happy to reach the limit for them.

[shakezula]

Agreed. My three person household would regularly hit my Comcast data cap of 1TB. They’re absolutely going to start lowering the cap, and they already charge you per Gb that you go over. They have an effective monopoly over my whole city, too. They’re the literal only choice for internet that’s not < 5mb.

Their years and years of lobbying is paying off already and it’s only going to get worse and worse for the end consumer. They are consistently rated as having one of the worse customer service experiences in the world. God help us all.

[selectodude]

They've already raised the cap a couple times so it's hard to think they're going to lower it. At the end of the day, their monopoly is due to owning the cable franchise for certain cities and if you get enough of your paying customers pissed off enough to speak to their leaders, that can be revoked.

See: Charter's cable franchise in New York City.